Auster contributed an extract from Moon Palace to the collection “Edward Hopper and the American Imagination,” and it is clear that Hopper’s images of alienated individuals have had a profound resonance for him. This paper employs two main ideas to compare them. First, a pivotal moment in American literature: the hotel room drama watched by Coverdale in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. Secondly, Aby Warburg’s concept of the “pathos formula” in art, which bypasses the problematic issue of influence, choosing instead (...) to posit sets of inherited cultural memories. It therefore allows discussion of the re-emergence of Hawthorne’s puritan tropes of paranoid specularity and transcendence in the work of Hopper and Auster. (shrink)

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)

Review of Why Music Moves Us by Jeanette Bicknell.

(2000). Federal world government at the dawn of the third millennium: Old challenges and new opportunities. World Futures: Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 41-106.

(1994). The rhetoric of science and the challenge of post‐liberal democracy. Social Epistemology: Vol. 8, Public Indifference to Population Issues, pp. 261-271.

Behavior genetics is a controversial science. For decades, scholars have sought to understand the role of heredity in human behavior and life-course outcomes. Recently, technological advances and the rapid expansion of genomic databases have facilitated the discovery of genes associated with human phenotypes such as educational attainment and substance use disorders. To maximize the potential of this flourishing science, and to minimize potential harms, careful analysis of what it would mean for genes to be causes of human behavior is needed. (...) In this paper, we advance a framework for identifying instances of genetic causes, interpreting those causal relationships, and applying them to advance causal knowledge more generally in the social sciences. Central to thinking about genes as causes is counterfactual reasoning, the cornerstone of causal thinking in statistics, medicine, and philosophy. We argue that within-family genetic effects represent the product of a counterfactual comparison in the same way as average treatment effects (ATEs) from randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Both ATEs from RCTs and within-family genetic effects are shallow causes: They operate within intricate causal systems (non-unitary), produce heterogeneous effects across individuals (non-uniform), and are not mechanistically informative (non-explanatory). Despite these limitations, shallow causal knowledge can be used to improve understanding of the etiology of human behavior and to explore sources of heterogeneity and fade-out in treatment effects. (shrink)

The pandemic significantly raised the stakes for the translation of bioethics insights into policy. The novelty, range and sheer quantity of the ethical problems that needed to be addressed urgently within public policy were unprecedented and required high‐bandwidth two‐way transfer of insights between academic bioethics and policy. Countries such as the United Kingdom, which do not have a National Ethics Committee, faced particular challenges in how to facilitate this. This paper takes as a case study the brief career of the (...) Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) for the NHS Covid‐19 App, which shows both the difficulty and the political complexity of policy‐relevant bioethics in a pandemic and how this was exacerbated by the transience and informality of the structures through which ethics advice was delivered. It analyses how and why, after EAB's demise, the Westminster government increasingly sought to either take its ethics advice in private or to evade ethical scrutiny of its policies altogether. In reflecting on EAB, and these later ethics advice contexts, the article provides a novel framework for analysing ethics advice within democracies, defining four idealised stances: the pure ethicist, the advocate, the ethics arbiter and the critical friend. (shrink)

Some philosophers working on the epistemology of disagreement claim that conciliationist responses to peer disagreement embody a kind of intellectual humility. Others contend that standing firm or ‘sticking to one's guns’ in the face of peer disagreement may stem from an admirable kind of courage or internal fortitude. In this paper, we report the results of two empirical studies that examine the relationship between conciliationist and steadfast responses to peer disagreement, on the one hand, and virtues such as intellectual humility, (...) courage, grit, and actively open-minded thinking, on the other. We observed positive correlations between measures of conciliationism, intellectual humility, and actively open-minded thinking but failed to find any reliable association between steadfastness, courage, and grit. Our studies reveal that there are at least two important intellectual virtues associated with conciliationist responses to peer disagreement (viz., intellectual humility and actively open-minded thinking) and two vices associated with steadfast responses (intellectual arrogance and myside bias). These findings shed new light on the overall epistemic goodness of the conciliationist perspective. (shrink)

Theories are part and parcel of just about every human activity that involves knowing about the world and our place in it. In all areas of inquiry from the most mundane to the most esoteric and sophisticated, theorizing plays a fundamental role. What is true of our everyday existence is even more pervasive in more scholarly fields. How is thinking about the subject organized? What methods are used in moving a neophyte in a given subject matter into the position of (...) a competent student of that subject? What, in short, is the prime repository and vehicle for the knowledge that has been acquired in any discipline over the course of its development? The answer is the theories that are used, produced, and promulgated by the practitioners of those disciplines. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Theory is a landmark work serving as something of a capstone to 10 prior SAGE encyclopedias that examined theory in specific social science disciplines (psychology, sociology, education, political science, etc.). Within the pages of this more general work, readers will learn about the complex decisions that are made when framing theory, what goes into constructing a powerful theory, why some theories change or fail, how theories reflect socio-historical moments in time and how – at their best – they form the foundations for exploring and unlocking the mysteries of the world around us. Key features include: · Over 300 signed articles written by key figures across the social sciences spread across four comprehensive volumes · Further Readings and Cross References conclude each article aiding readers further in their research · A Reader’s Guide organizes entries by broad themes. · A Resource Guide takes readers to the next step in their research journeys by listing classic books in the field, key journals, associations, and websites. (shrink)

Luthra, Peraza-Santiago, Beeson, Saltzman, Crinnion, and Magnuson (2021) present data from the lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation paradigm that they claim provides conclusive evidence in favor of top-down processing in speech perception. We argue here that this evidence does not support that conclusion. The findings are open to alternative explanations, and we give data in support of one of them (that there is an acoustic confound in the materials). Lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation thus remains elusive, while prior data from (...) the paradigm instead challenge the idea that there is top-down processing in online speech recognition. (shrink)

In this article, I challenge Simon Critchley's recent suggestion that tragic art is not morally educational in Aristotle's analysis and instead argue that it can be inferred from Aristotle that tragic art can morally educate in three main ways: via emotion education, by helping the audience come to understand what matters in life, and by depicting conduct worthy of moral emulation and conduct that is not. Stephen Halliwell's reading of how catharsis helps the audience of tragedy learn to feel pity (...) and fear appropriately is discussed. Two objections Lear makes to Halliwell's account are thereafter outlined and responded to. I maintain that for Aristotle, the pleasure proper to tragedy is prompted by an understanding of what matters most in life—not making mistakes that threaten the prosperity of loved ones. I pull the article together by questioning aspects of Christopher Falzon's reading of Ruben Östlund's film, Force Majeure. I conclude that the film both exemplifies and critiques Aristotle's account of moral learning through tragedy. (shrink)

What is the relationship between, on the one hand, the sorts of causal claims found in the special sciences (and in common sense) and, on the other hand, the world as described by physics? A standard picture goes like this: the fundamental laws of physics are causal laws in the sense that they can be interpreted as telling us that realizations of one set of physical factors or properties “causes” realizations of other properties. Causal claims in the special sciences are (...) then true (to the extent that they are) in virtue of “instantiating” these underlying causal laws; as it is often put, the latter serve as “truth-makers” for the former. The picture is thus one according to which the notion of cause, as it occurs in the special sciences, is reflected or “grounded” in a fairly straightforward and transparent way in a similar notion that occurs in fundamental physics. This paper explores some alternatives to this picture. (shrink)

In this paper the potential in film for ethics education is considered, and the theory of educational ethicism is defended. Some key features of ethicism are firstly outlined. Bery’s Gaut’s argument about how artworks may teach ethics in an aesthetically meritorious way is also discussed. Two objections (from Matthew Kieran and Andrea Sauchelli) to Gaut’s position are then considered. It is argued that Gaut’s ethicism is not well placed to overcome these objections. However, I draw upon Paul Hirst to explain (...) why a refined species of ethicism (educational ethicism) can surmount these objections. Educational ethicism holds that artworks with ethical themes be regarded as starting points for conversations about ethics rather than conveyers of definite ethical teachings that only a normatively specified audience can grasp. Three ways that film can possess potential for ethics education are also documented: through the moral growth of the audience, by helping them to deepen understanding of an aspect of ethical experience, and in developing theoretical understanding. (shrink)

Beliefs should conform to some norms. Epistemic instrumentalism holds that your beliefs should conform to these epistemic norms just because conforming is useful. But there seems to be cases where conforming to the epistemic norms isn’t useful at all, as in so-called “too-few-reasons” cases. In response to these cases, universal epistemic instrumentalists argue that despite first appearances, it is always useful to conform to the epistemic norms. I argue that all current versions of this universalist response are objectionable. I conclude (...) with a conjecture about why no version of universalism will succeed. (shrink)

Kneeling down or grovelling on the ground, even to express your reverence for heavenly things, is contrary to human dignity.

In this contribution, I defend the standard list of jus ad bellum principles. In The Ethics of War and the Force of Law: A Modern Just War Theory, Uwe Steinhoff endorses only three principles of jus ad bellum (right intention, just cause, and proportionality) and claims that the others are redundant. I argue that, although fundamentally all jus ad bellum principles can be reduced to proportionality, in practice it is vital to retain the main jus ad bellum criteria as separate (...) principles. (shrink)

After examining the problem that gratuitous suffering poses for Nietzsche's notion of life affirmation, I mount a skeptical response to this problem on Nietzsche's behalf. I then consider an orthogonal objection to Nietzschean life affirmation, which argues that the need to justify life is symptomatic of life denial and show how strengthening the skeptical defense sidesteps this worry. Nietzsche's skepticism about our all‐too‐human, epistemic position thus aids his project of life affirmation in two ways. First, it suggests that we are (...) unable to determine reliably whether a given instance of suffering is, in fact, gratuitous. Second, it provides a corrective to the moralistic need to redeem life, showing that all attempts to justify life as a whole are epistemically fraught. Before concluding, I examine Nietzsche's reasons for advancing such an epistemological argument and suggest how we might approach life affirmation in nonrational terms. (shrink)

This paper assesses the effect of DNA barcoding—the use of informative genetic markers to identify and discriminate between species—on taxonomy. Throughout, we interpret this in terms of _varipraxis_, a concept we introduce to make sense of the treatment of biological variation by scientists and other practitioners. From its inception, DNA barcoding was criticised for being reductive, in attempting to replace multiple forms of taxonomic evidence with just one: DNA sequence variation in one or a few indicative genes. We show, though, (...) how DNA barcoding has not narrowed or reduced taxonomy in the way it was projected to. We examine the development and implementation of DNA barcoding across three kingdoms of life: animals, plants, and protists. Through this, we demonstrate that for DNA barcoding to work, the range of acceptable intra-specific variation needs to be demarcated from variation deemed to be characteristic of inter-specific differences. Consequently, biological processes responsible for particular patterns of variation need to be investigated and understood. This encourages an integrative disposition towards understanding and explaining the evolutionary processes affecting the rate and nature of change at the nucleotide level. We detail how the impact of DNA barcoding has manifested differently across the three kingdoms we examine, assessing this in terms of the ontological commitments that are held and instantiated in practice. Based on this evaluation, we consider the problem of studying multi-kingdom communities, and assess the consequences of our analysis for understanding classification and taxonomy. (shrink)

Fair allocation of scarce healthcare resources has been much studied within philosophy and bioethics, but analysis has focused on a narrow range of cases. The Covid-19 pandemic provided significant new challenges, making powerfully visible the extent to which health systems can be fragile, and how scarcities within crucial elements of interlinked care pathways can lead to cascading failures. Health system resilience, while previously a key topic in global health, can now be seen to be a vital concern in high-income countries (...) too. Unfortunately, mainstream philosophical approaches to the ethics of rationing and prioritisation provide little guidance for these new problems of scarcity. Indeed, the cascading failures were arguably exacerbated by earlier attempts to make health systems leaner and more efficient. This paper argues that health systems should move from simple and atomistic approaches to measuring effectiveness to approaches that are holistic both in focusing on performance at the level of the health system as a whole, and also in incorporating a wider range of ethical concerns in thinking about what makes a health system good. (shrink)

In this introduction, we consider how this volume demonstrates not only that the question of sexual difference can be asked with Irigaray but that her project necessitates engaging the question if we are to take seriously her diagnosis of sexual difference as “one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” We consider how Irigaray's questioning of sexual difference implicates a dialectic of natural and cultural determinations, challenging reductive and essentialist readings of her project. In the (...) process, we trace how the contributors of this volume think sexual difference with Irigaray, revealing the value of her thought for addressing contemporary debates about sex, gender, and race. (shrink)

I begin with a defence of both Gyekye’s universalist and African metaphilosophies. In light of these metaphilosophies, I discuss the contemporary Western hegemony of materialist philosophy of mind and its origins in Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949), showing that the existence and nature of the traditional Akan philosophy, as elaborated by Gyekye, casts serious doubt on some influential founding motivations for materialism. I then argue that traditional Akan philosophy is best aligned with contemporary idealism. Gyekye’s endorsement of dualism (...) is shown to have not been intended as ontologically fundamental, while panpsychism is rejected on the basis of the resistance it offers to the Akan commitment to transcendence. Contemporary idealism, however, is able to accommodate all the main components of traditional Akan philosophy, making both experiential primacy and transcendence central to a metaphysical understanding of reality. Sunsum (spirit) and ōkra (soul) are understood in terms of the distinction between the phenomenal and horizonal conceptions of experience, with consciousness always requiring a distinction between the phenomenal world within an experiential horizon, and the independent being that transcends the horizon. (shrink)

Jeremiah Carey presents a version of panentheism which he attributes to Gregory Palamas, as well as other Greek patristic thinkers. The Greek tradition, he alleges, is more open to panentheistic metaphysics than the Latin. Palamas, for instance, hold that God’s energies are participable, even if God’s essence is not. Carey uses Palamas’ metaphysics to sketch an account on which divine energies are the forms of created substances, and argues it is open to Orthodox Christians to affirm that God is in (...) all things as their formal cause. I argue Carey’s reading is premised on a superficial examination of the patristic literature. More importantly, Palamas’ metaphysics is opposed to that of Carey, since Palamas’ distinction aims to uphold that created persons are only contingent participants in God. On this, Palamas and the Latins are in complete accord. In conclusion, I propose panentheistic metaphysics begins from a false dilemma. (shrink)

R G Collingwood is an important twentieth century historian, archaeologist and philosopher whose works are the subject of continued interest, analysis and study. There is an unquestionable need to support this research activity with the provision of a reference guide which is fully up-to-date, informed and authoritative. The Companion will therefore list all primary and secondary material relevant to the study of Collingwood in all his fields of expertise - historical theory, philosophy and archaeology. It will also provide a guide (...) to archive material relevant to his life, together with sources and locations. The resulting volume will provide an essential companion to the understanding of the life and thought of R G Collingwood. (shrink)

As a response to the problem of evil, the free will defense proposes that evil might exist as a consequence of God’s endowing human beings with moral freedom which we have tragically misused. Standard versions of the free will defense assume that (1) our moral freedom began in this earthly existence and (2) what explains our suffering in this world must constitute an abuse rather than a right use of our moral freedom. However, there is another variation of the free (...) will defense that does not share these assumptions. This version of the free will defense appeals to the pre-existence of the human soul. Here I consider a premortalist free will defense according to which each human soul might have rational concourse with God prior to the start of her earthly career and during which she might choose the sort of life she is to live on earth, complete with all of the trials and difficulties necessary to develop a certain kind of desirable character. Given the possibility that such a theory is true, the reach of the free will defense is significantly expanded. (shrink)

This article argues that Jeremy Bentham put forward a distinctive and original theory of representative democracy which can be helpfully analysed through his concept of the ‘deputy’. A deputy, Bentham argued, evoked a specific political relationship between governors and the governed – a relationship that was functionally different to that between the people and a ‘representative’ or a ‘delegate’. Whereas a representative was suggestive of too great a degree of governmental independence from the people and a delegate implied an excessive (...) dependency of governors upon the governed, a deputy for Bentham best described the relationship between the rulers and the ruled that should subsist in a representative democracy. A political form based on deputies, who were to be relatively free to conduct the business of government yet simultaneously accountable to their sovereign electors, was the only way in his eyes to guarantee the promotion of utility in politics and the security of the people from being misruled. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

A battle is raging for the soul of America, and it is of critical interest to the survival of freedom world-wide. Our nation is surrendering its fundamental values of individual responsibility and self determination. Domestically we exchange our privacy and autonomy for the chimera of security; internationally we abdicate our ability to act in our national interest. Why are we squandering the precious jewels of the greatest political experiment in human history? What actions can thoughtful citizens take to protect and (...) regain their personal freedoms? This important collection of essays is supplemented by lengthy appendices containing the primary reference materials that underlie the author's bold assertions. Readers will fearlessly explore the modern plague of collectivism, especially as embodied by the United Nations; learn the true political, historical, and spiritual roots of the September 11th attacks; revisit the Waco massacre without averting their glance; witness the cynical manipulations of the civilian disarmament movement; and be invited to contemplate the role of transcendent values in the battle to preserve and maintain freedom. (shrink)